Patrick Wells, an architect, had a long history of medical problems, including running nose (rhinitis), coughing, headache, fatigue, mental confusion, and intermittent bouts of depression. Like many people in Chicago, he worked in the Loop and commuted by rail to a suburb west of the city. Under my care, he had already controlled various aspects of indoor air pollution in his home, yet many of his symptoms persisted. Suspecting that there was a relationship between the weather and his problems, he kept a log of all of his symptoms for each day, and of the weather conditions prevailing on that day. He carefully monitored this for a year, without missing a day. He also obtained data from the United States Weather Bureau concerning wind velocity and visibility on these days.
Wells found that he was, in effect, a “human barometer.” At both home and work, he remained symptom-free on those days when the wind blew from the west, northwest, and north (there is little industry in these regions). Invariably, however, his depression and other symptoms returned when the wind blew from the east, and particularly from the southeast. This, of course, is where the heavy industry is located, especially the refineries and largest industrial plants. Winds from the south and even the southwest were also troublesome.
It was particularly interesting that Wells had no trouble from any wind with a velocity of fifteen or more miles per hour. The pollution, apparently, had to drift slowly over the area at a leisurely three to seven miles per hour in order to affect him.
Wells’ observations were later confirmed by other chemically susceptible patients in Chicago. It was always the slow, southern winds that brought with them symptom-causing pollution. In particular, as Wells found, the severity of such effects could be correlated with the visibility factor (visibility being defined as the distance one is able to see spaced lights). The lesser the visibility, the greater the chance of chronic symptoms on any particular day.
Further incidents revealed the remarkable carrying power of these slowly drifting winds, and how they could bring pollution to the doorstep of unsuspecting people many miles away.
One day, in the Chicago area, a number of my chemically susceptible patients became acutely ill at the same time. Several of them claimed to smell refinery odors in the air, although they did not live near refineries. Plotting their homes on a map and studying weather patterns for that day, 1 concluded that these people were reacting to chemical “fallout” from the Joliet refineries, although they all lived in the northern suburbs of Chicago, forty to seventy-five miles away.
Many similar incidents have occurred over the years. Even the northernmost suburbs of Chicago, near the Wisconsin border, occasionally receive some of the air pollution from Chicago’s south side. In fact, there is no residential area within a fifty- to seventy-five-mile radius of the center of Chicago which is consistently free of air pollution from the city or its industrial locales. The same is true of many American cities.
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